


Misadventures at Windcliffe

by Sionnan



Category: Dark Shadows (1966)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25775629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sionnan/pseuds/Sionnan
Summary: Willie Loomis is shot on the Evan's lawn. He awakes in Windcliffe.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	Misadventures at Windcliffe

**Author's Note:**

> Another Dark Shadows WIP. At some point I'll finish it.

_i. the flight_

The grass is pressed against his face, and he can hear the constant song of the summer crickets. He is just slightly outside his body, just barely adjacent.

He had stepped, trembling, at the huge French doors, and heard men shouting. So he ran.

He had been running, legs churning, like he was trying to catch a freight train, and then the pain came and knocked him out of his body.

In retrospect, he realized they must have shot him. Rifle shots, the kind he remembered from his bayou childhood, of men hunting deer and cougars.

His breath seemed too close, too stuttered and scratchy, and then a warm blossom of pain seemed to unfurl on the left side of his back, and his breath hitched. An unbearable sense of fullness flooded his chest, and his next breath sounded like he was drowning, and a horrible sputtering, choking sound crowded over the crickets, and Willie felt himself sinking into that warm pool of pain.

He had dreams of drowning, all through his adulthood. It was the curse of the sailor, to dream of dying in the sea, the water becoming your tomb. Here, the warm wetness spread through his chest, his throat, and he coughed weakly, his fingers curling into the ancient turf of the Evan's lawn. A warm speckle dotted the green smell, and the unbearable scent of copper bloomed.

Maggie? Was she safe?

Jason? Jason?

A darkness began creeping in around the corners of the world, and in the distance he could hear the growl of car engines, and even further away the scream of a siren. The blackness overtook him.

He woke up three times in the hospital. The first was shortly after the operation, and no one was in his room. His vision peeled apart in layers, and struggling into consciousness was like battling a rip tide. The first sensation to cloak him was pain, and his frightened animal gasp shuffled him back into the darkness.

The second time was a more tortuous affair. It felt as though a massive rusty fishing hook had pierced his ribcage and was pulling him slowly to consciousness. He registered his own fear even before he realized he was awake, that instant, instinctive reaction that he knew he needed to flee. A jumble of recollections and memories flooded him; the dark, cold stench of a sealed tomb and a guttural, slavering thing in the dark that broke off pieces of his soul; the smell of a green, green lawn, and the feeling of something that hurt too deep.

And the dark.  
God please don’t let it get dark.

A woman’s perfume. A girlish perfume, something young and pretty, something she saved all year for with her meager waitress salary.

No, that wasn’t it. That was another person. The perfume now was a mature woman’s perfume, something that almost reminded him of Jason’s cologne.

Jason, was Jason here? He would help him, help pick up the shattered pile of Willie Loomis after one of his many beatings. Jason would help him leave before the dark fell—

But the narrow, clever face of the person above him was neither a sweet waitress or the craggy, rakish face of Jason, and he felt lost. Alone?

He was scared.

Oh God. That pain, that pain. He was in the crypt again, with the sudden and total awareness that he was dying. His soul, tethered to the rivulet of blood, being pulled inch by inch from his body. He had never been that afraid before, knowing, feeling himself losing his soul.

But the crypt wasn’t this bright white place, with a woman’s perfume and a man’s scornful voice.

Was it getting dark?

_ii. the nadir_

He had to relearn to walk. Dave Woodard, that sympathetic stalwart paragon of New England medicine, had had a gentle, firm conversation shortly after Willie had been shipped to Windcliffe. They were quite sure at first Willie would be a paraplegic, and he would undergo exercises not to lose his muscle tone.

One of the shots had pierced a lung and collapsed it, and it was a miracle they hadn't needed to remove the lung altogether. A distant memory of one of his shipmates sprang to his head who had a lung removed from disease. Willie shuddered at the memories.

One bullet had shattered his right scapula, and he would always have some pain. All of the wounds would cause him residual pain, Woodard had said, but this wound had cast off fragments of the bullet which couldn't be removed. Some were too small and buried in muscle. Some were too close to his heart. After delivering that piece of intelligence, in Woodard’s absence, Willie had reached up to his chest and touched the bandages there, trying to find the piece of metal that nestled against his heart. It was a comfort, in some way. Something concrete, something final. Unpredictable, sure, but there was something good about a slow death from a bullet that pierced him months ago.

The nurses and orderlies were kind. Bizarrely kind, to be honest, for the most part. Willie recalled the military hospitals of his early youth, the dead fatigue, and couldn't reconcile the gentle and upbeat attitudes of the staff here.

For the first several weeks, all he dreamt of was the steady beat of the unending dark, and something predatory waiting in the shadows. That fear was an implacable old companion, a pale doppleganger that stood in the corner with a devilish sneer and seemed to say, you wait. Just you wait. You’ll remember. As though forgetting was a luxury that he hadn’t afforded himself another time. Not that he could remember.

The healing was hell. And it hurt. They were convinced he would be a paraplegic, and a month into the affair he woke in the dark of the ward, crying involuntarily. His legs were burning like they were on fire, and his cries brought the night nurse, who summoned the charge nurse, who called Doctor Woodard from his cozy bed.

The bay was blanketed in gauzy shadows, the strange kind of restful half-light that came from high, distant lamps from the yard and intercepted by the gentle slope of the half-arch windows. One of the nurses had turned on the lamp clipped to the head of his bed, to avoid waking the others in the ward near them, and Willie could see the light crest on the sides of blanketed shapes that tapered into the darkness.

Under the blankets, Willie himself only wore a long shirt, mostly for ease of the staff. As the nurse turned back the thick covers, he could see the nightmare shape of his legs, pale and withered from atrophy. The nurse left to confer with Woodard, who had emerged at the head of the ward, and Willie tried spreading his fingers across the flesh of his legs, trying to soothe the strange, buzzing pain that filled him. Without the blankets, the sensation had actually sharpened, and he threw his head back against the pillow, choking on a convulsive groan. He could feel reflexive tears coursing down his face. He had only felt this helpless once before, and the fear of that memory began mounting.

Woodard and his nurses returned after an eternity, Willie not quite able to understand or respond to questions around the steady roar of burning in his legs. They moved around his bed as though in some dance, finally with Woodard at the end. Willie, still weeping and trying from his prone position to claw at the burning in his thighs, begged Woodard to stop jabbing his feet with the pin, he could feel it already. Their stunned silence was nearly as palpable as the pain, and Willie begged them to do something, anything to make it stop.

Woodard himself produced a glass syringe from a tray, and injected something into the tube going into Willie’s arm. The low buzz of the sedative swept over him, and then after a moment, he fell back into the blissful abyss.

_iii. the ascent_

And thus began the months of recuperation. Several days after waking to find he had sensation in his previously useless legs, a bevy of nurses and several male attendants who Willie hadn’t seen before, were led by Woodard to Willie’s bed. After Woodard bid him a good morning, they mostly spoke over him, so Willie didn’t pay much attention until one of the men pulled back the covers to grasp experimentally at the muscles in his thigh. The immediacy of the pain made Willie gasp, and he must have blacked out for a second because he came to with the same guy waving ammonia under his nose.

“Incredible,” the guy said, in that tight, chewed up accent of a New Yorker who’d done a stint in the military. And though Willie had never seen him before, he knew this type instantly, reminding him of his time in Korea, the matter of fact medic who stitched together the torn flesh of a battalion of kids.

“It hit his spine.” It wasn’t a question, but Woodard hummed an affirmative. The guy came up to Willie’s shoulder, and finally looked down at him to say, “I’m gonna roll you a bit, pal,” and another male attendant slipped his hand under Willie’s wasted hip, and together they leveraged him off the mattress. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, as though he had confirmed for himself the holes in Willie’s back.

He was returned to his prone position, much less liking this level of interference with his body. The attendant shrugged, a kind of “what the fuck” gesture. “I guess we could give it a go.” Woodard had stepped back up near Willie, and fixed him with that frank gaze.

“Well, Willie?”

He glanced between them, uncomprehending. “What?”

“Are you willing to try? Try to walk?”

It seemed unwise, to say the least. “Now?” His voice cracked, partly from fear, partly from the constant dry mouth from the pain kilers. His response drew a wave of benevolent chuckles from the crowd, and again Willie was swamped with a sense of surreality, disconcerted by their kindness. This all had to be some kind of weird dream, right? He was going to wake up, in a wave of pain, his mind supplying him with a gentle fantasy of kind people treating him gently. He had remembered the nightmare fragments of what must have been Julia and Barnabas, their voices hollow and distant, talking over his body. He didn't remember their words, but recalled they suggested Willie was trying to hurt Maggie. If that had been real, why were these people here treating him so kindly?

He bit back on an unexpected surge of emotion. His uncertain grasp of reality combined with the unintended pressure from the personnel had evoked a vulnerability that Willie didn't like showing. This wasn't just pain, this was a tumult of fear and hope and betrayal. He took a minute to squash it down in a small dark part of his mind, and said, his voice wobbling precariously, “Alright. I'll try.”


End file.
